By Jacqueline Woodson
Seven generations of one family, from a girl born into slavery to the author herself, connected by quilts stitched with secret maps to freedom.
This is Jacqueline Woodson's own family, seven generations of it. It opens with a girl named Soonie's great-grandmother, sold away from her mother and father when she was seven, who learns to sew maps into quilts — 'show ways' that pointed the road to freedom. From there the story moves forward one generation at a time, mother to daughter to daughter, through slavery, emancipation, the civil rights marches, and on down to Woodson and her own child. The quilts and the stories get handed along the whole way.
Most books about this history stay inside the years of slavery. This one draws a single unbroken line from an enslaved child all the way to a family living now, so the distance between then and today shrinks to a handful of grandmothers. It's lyrical and packed tight, more poem than plot, so it rewards reading twice and slowing down. Woodson writes like the Newbery winner she is, and the language is doing a lot of the work.